Dissent in Wartime: 1860s Edition

From The American Conservative‘s own Bill Kauffman and “Gods and Generals” director Ron Maxwell comes “The Copperhead,” about one family’s experience trying to stay out of a much bigger war than Iraq or Vietnam.

The film raises some questions that may not be great for ticket sales but that deserve to be taken as seriously as anything in “Zero Dark Thirty”: are the only wars where dissent is permissible those that history decides weren’t worth fighting—and what penalties must noncombatants on the wrong side of history suffer?

Or consider this: if the Iraq War really had swiftly brought about a stable, prosperous liberal democracy in the Middle East, perhaps even setting off the chain reaction of liberalization in the region that supporters had hoped for, would opposition still be seen in retrospect as legitimate? If the South had won the Civil War, would 21st-century citizens of the North look back on the war as a noble but unsuccessful effort to end slavery—or at least to preserve the Union—or would they view it as not only a lost war but also one whose motives were different as well?

Or consider this: if the Iraq War really had swiftly brought about a stable, prosperous liberal democracy in the Middle East, perhaps even setting off the chain reaction of liberalization in the region that supporters had hoped for, would opposition still be seen in retrospect as legitimate? If the South had won the Civil War, would 21st-century citizens of the North look back on the war as a noble but unsuccessful effort to end slavery—or at least to preserve the Union—or would they view it as not only a lost war but also one whose motives were different as well?

The first question makes for an interesting thought experiment. A large number of those who supported the Iraq War at the time still don’t consider the opposition at the time legitimate, even considering its outcome, seeing that opposition’s vindication as a stopped clock sort of prediction. However, had the war’s outcome been a rosy success, I could imagine some of those same prowar voices tending to dismissive magnanimity toward those erstwhile opponents. The opponents who opposed the war in large part opposed it on the basis of facts that had more to do with our motivations than with our chances of success. Unless those facts were different in this gedankenexperiment (e.g., there really were WMDs), I don’t know how many would regret their opposition. A successfully prosecuted war does not legitimize entry into that war to those who opposed it in the first place (see the Spanish-American War in the Phillipines).

The second question, regarding a counterhistorical Civil War, rather glosses over the fact that we already popularly conflate the true motives for the war. The Union certainly wasn’t fighting to free slaves. There would have been mass desertion and even more riots than there were had that ever been made an explicit cause. They fought to preserve the Union, certainly a legitimate war goal, but not noble to any large degree in and of itself. The Confederacy, on the other hand, the side that had planned and threatened and started the war, DID fight for slavery and thus against the economic interests of most of its free citizenry. The vast majority of Americans, North and South, did not want a war. A minority of rich and influential Southerners did and pulled a massive con on their fellows, convincing them that the northern states intended speedy emancipation (a lie, but even had it been true most white Southerners would have been far better off) rather than only attempting to eventually gain control of Congress through territorial expansion and preventing the expansion of slavery. Had the South won that war, unless the slavery system had not only survived and spread to this day, those fire-eaters would have claimed their full measure of credit for their machinations, rather than hiding from and obscuring their past actions, as so many did. They would have blazed high as heroes in history for a time, and then later been sunk far deeper in villainy by posterity for their crimes.

Randolph Bourne once stated during the 1st World War that “War is the health of the state .” The American Civil War showed this to be true. With the Lincoln doctrine of “preserving the union” America’s central government cemented its power over the individual states and over the individual citizens. This situation was one of the first large nails in the coffin of the U.S.Constitution. In essence,Lincoln ignored his Constitutional oath and proceeded to invest almost all power into the Central Government thus making the America Republic and its Constitution null and void. This situation,in essence,makes Abraham Lincoln the American Lenin.

Clement Vallandigham was a former two term Congressman (arrested about two months after his term ended), not a Senator (of which Ohio had the same quota of two that every other state had: Ben Wade and John Sherman in 1863).

steve in Ohio: “Here in southern Ohio, outside of Cincinnati, they were very anti-war. Lincoln became so angry with our one Senator that he exiled him to the Confederacy.”

Uh, Vallandigham was a Representative, not a Senator. The two senators from Ohio during the Civil War (John Sherman and Benjamin Wade) were both Republicans.

Lincoln didn’t exile Vallandigham to the Confederacy out of “anger” by the way. He did so because on the one hand he did not want to repudiate Burnside’s order arresting him, and on the other he didn’t want to make too much of a martyr of him by keeping him in prison. Vallandigham relocated to Canada, ran in absentia for governor of Ohio and lost badly. He then returned to the US where he helped insert the peace plank in the Democratic platform, which probably did more than anything else (apart from the fall of Atlanta) to re-elect Lincoln.

I don’t understand the moral principle to be drawn out from alternate history. Dissent in itself is not the equivalent of heroism or moral integrity. There were many war dissenters in the New York riots in 1863, most of whom acted as outright scoundrels and barbarians.

No other country in the world had a civil war between its free citizens over the status of slavery (as distinct from slave uprisings, most notably Haiti’s war of independence). Brazil, which was every bit the slave society as the antebellum US if not more so, enacted a gradual, peaceful emancipation.

Our Civil War came about because of the intransigence of the extremists on both sides, fueled by much religious zealotry (the self-righteous absolutism of the Puritan-descent abolitionists and the “curse of Ham”-quoting aristocrats of the Cotton Belt). A gradual and/or compensated emancipation was entirely possible — if you think that buying out the slaveholders would have been too expensive, just think of how much the war cost — but the fanatics North and South would brook no compromise.

Americans today like to think of the Civil War as some moral crusade, which, along with World War II, was holy and pure and the highest example of a “just” war. What bunk! It was an avoidable, unchristian catastrophe that left nearly 700,000 people dead, hundreds of thousands more grievously wounded, half the country devastated, many kings’ ransoms of wealth squandered, and a bitter regional and racial divide that persists in some degree to this day.

Lincoln did offer to buy out slaveholders, but was rejected. In fact, for the first year of the war, he was willing to accept the slave states back into the Union with the institution of slavery intact, and publicly rebuked his generals who called for emancipation in the territories they controlled (like General Fremont). So Lincoln was always ready to compromise (short of allowing the South to secede) to avoid a prolonged conflict, but the Confederates would have none of it.

The reason the war escalated into a bloodbath was because the South had some brilliant generals, like Lee and Jackson, while the North had incompetents like McClellan, Pope, Burnside and Hooker. Had McClellan and Lee switched sides, the war would have been over in a year, with much of southern society unaffected. The tragedy for the South was that they had enough resources to make for a valiant struggle, but not enough to win the fight.

By the way, if war could ever be alled moral, a fight to end slavery would qualify. When, 150 years after a conflict in which many whites considered blacks to be sub-human, that same country would elect a black president, has to be considered progress.

The Civil War was the culmination of decades of tension, missed opportunities, and political stalemate. Why could no gradual or compensated emancipation have been enacted in the three-quarters of century or so before the war? The abolitionist fanatics wanted slavery eradicated and the plantation aristocracy humiliated all in one radical fell swoop; whereas the planter aristocracy was too greedy to contemplate paying fair wages to a free labor force, too prejudiced against industry to consider mechanized agricultural improvements to ameliorate their labor needs, and drunk on fantasies of an American slave empire stretching to the Pacific coast and deep into Latin America.

By the way, if war could ever be alled moral, a fight to end slavery would qualify. When, 150 years after a conflict in which many whites considered blacks to be sub-human, that same country would elect a black president, has to be considered progress.

Serious question: What experience do you have with war? People who know something about war outside of Hollywood films know that a war can be at best a necessary evil, as in Christian just war theory, but an evil nonetheless. Abraham Lincoln avoided the smug self-righteousness of so many of his later admirers: he refused to blame the South alone for the war, reigned in the zealotry of the Radical Republicans, and planned for a peace “with malice toward none, [and] with charity for all.” (He was also a supporter of repatriating emancipated slaves to Africa. Don’t hear much about that nowadays, do we?)

As for Obama, he is not a descendant of antebellum slaves. He is a mulatto descended in part, through his white mother, of some slave masters. Indeed, through his father, he is likely descended from African Muslim slave traders. I see that you have swallowed whiterpeople liberal mythology and liked the taste.

I would have opposed the war in Iraq on the grounds I have previously noted. Simply unwarranted — the spread of democracy or not.

I am unclear about the civil war. It was a mistake launched by the south. Their trump card was union above all — so upon winning the hand they spoiled the prize by attacking Fort Sumpter. I am of the mind that slavery would have killed itself. But the thought of another 100 or fifty years of degradation of black people as animals — seems a disgusting alternative, and am experiencing that disugust for the first time. In general I have always been rather skeptical about the civil war.

But exposure to so many comments here and elsewhere tells me that black people in this country are victims still and victims of their own victimhood. That a power structure still exists designed to serve whites. There are several issues I have with Martin Luther King and others least are the affairs, but his comments before he died becoming more real to me with each passing year “America is sick.” I think he was distressed at just how much evil had been applied to the blackness of one’s skin.

Many will of course call my conservative credentials into question — but how we respond to skin color of our fellow citizens and I am not talking about immigrants, remains a deeply contradiction of all that we are.

It didn’t start out that way, but it sure ended that way. In his Second Inaugural, Lincoln framed the war as a moral conflict in truly Biblical terms:

“If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him? Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said “the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.”

To equate the abolitionists (a loud but politically weak minority) with the slaveholding aristocracy that controlled southern states, and had influence throughout the country out of all proportion to their numbers, is “both sides do it” taken to a ridiculous extreme.

Also, once Union troops began moving into the deep South and encountering slavery on a large scale, attitudes changed.

To Noah,
I am no fan of war, and agree it would have been far better for all concerned—and particularly for the South—had slavery been negotiated away. But all that I have read has shown that a violent conflict was inevitable, for reasons that you enumerated above. Compromises that were enacted in those years to hold the fragile union together only seemed to increase the dissatisfaction and ill will on both sides. Tensions simply kept raising, principally over the extension of slavery into the western territories, which everyone knew would change the country’s balance of power. For the South, it wasn’t just that Lincoln was unacceptable for arguing against the spread of slavery, but Douglas was also unacceptable for arguing that the territories should be allowed to choose for themselves whether they wanted slavery or not. Southern delegates walked out of the Democratic convention over the issue and set up their own platform with their own candidate, a move that splintered the party and guaranteed a Republican victory. By 1860, compromise over anything was impossible. The two sides were going to fight.

It does nothing to minimize the folly or the tragedy of the Civil War, a horror many orders of magnitude greater than this country has seen before or since, to note that one unquestionable good did result from it, the ending of slavery in the United States. That even Abraham Lincoln would have been unable to imagine Barack Obama’s election to the presidency shows how fundamental a shift this was.

The States of the Confederacy had no interest in negotiating the question of slavery. What they wanted was their independence from rulers whose interests were foreign to their own, just as in 1776. It wasn’t just that Lincoln’s offer to the southern states to enshrine their right to slavery permanently in the Constitution was disingenuous – it was that with the expansion of the country and the admission of more non-slave states the balance of power in Washington was going to fall decidedly to those whose economies and economic interests were decidedly different from the those of the South. Non-slaveholding whites in the South, as much as slaveholders, depended upon the smooth functioning of the agriculture-driven slave economy, just as many people in Michigan in our day, not employed by any automaker, have been dependent upon the health of that industry for their livelihood. The South wanted free markets for their tobacco, cotton and rice in Europe, unhindered by the high tariffs on manufactured goods imposed by Northern legislators in Washington.

Even so, only a minority of Southern states were going to move to secede until Lincoln began calling for them to place troops under his command to go to war with the Confederacy. The South did not seek war, but if war was going to be forced upon them they were going to fight with their close countrymen, their Southern brethren, not against them.

The outflow of verbiage when the Civil War shows up in a blog is, as far as I can see, people 150 years later desperate to make sure that the proverbial “first casualty in war” does not rise from the dead.

I greatly anticipate the movie “The Copperhead.” “Gods and Generals” is one of my favorite movies, beautiful and heartbreakingly evocative, and Bill Kauffman one of my favorite political writers. (Political writer is an insufficient description.)

It’s hard not to laugh when people suggest that a slave uprising would have been a morally preferable alternative to the Civil War. Actual slave uprisings are horrifically violent — entire families are wiped out, babies killed in their cribs, that sort of thing. At least the Civil War was largely fought between soldiers.